Angel Face (4 page)

After she was arrested, the police set a trap for Amanda by telling her she had tested positive for HIV. This sort of psychological trickery is commonly used by investigators in Italy to illicit a confession. In this case, it led a terrified Amanda to make a grave error that would permanently taint her image. She listed all the men she had slept with recently, trying to decide who might have infected her. The prosecutors knew
the press would jump at these salacious details of Amanda’s sex life, and one of the detectives close to the case leaked the document to British tabloid reporter Nick Pisa, who broke the story. Amanda wrote in her prison diary:

At the end, she concluded that it had to be Ross, Elis, or Raffaele Sollecito, then twenty-three, her most recent conquest, who, she noted, “used to use extensive
drugs.” (Police later told Amanda that the test results had been a “false positive.”)

Consensual sex is not a crime. So Amanda’s promiscuity has little bearing on the murder itself. But her uninhibited behavior did cause problems between the roommates—problems that the prosecution would try to spin into a motive for murder. In his final arguments, the lead prosecutor hypothesized that as Amanda helped assault Meredith, she yelled, “You are always behaving like a little saint. Now we will show you. Now we will make you have sex.” Even before coming to Europe, Amanda, at times, seemed obsessed with sex. The to-do list she made for moving to Perugia included visiting a sex shop and buying condoms. Her diaries were full of fantasy letters to various lovers. To one former boyfriend she wrote in August 2007: “I’m waiting for you, I want to see something porno with you and put it into practice with you.” And once she arrived in Europe, she e-mailed friends back home about hooking up with a stranger on the train. One of her last postings on Facebook declared, “I don’t get embarrassed and therefore have very few social inhibitions.”

Sexual confidence is one thing; blatant exhibitionism is quite another. Meredith was so mortified by the
pink “Rampant Rabbit” vibrator on display in their shared bathroom that she felt compelled to point it out to everyone who visited and explain that it wasn’t hers. It almost seemed as if Amanda were brandishing it as a symbol of her sexual power over Meredith. “Isn’t it odd that a girl arrives and the first thing she shows is a vibrator?” Meredith’s friend Amy Frost would later ask.

Housekeeping was another point of conflict among the roommates. Amanda left unwashed dishes in the kitchen, her clothes and shoes were often scattered throughout the common areas, and Filomena and Laura finally resorted to a cleaning schedule in an effort to keep the house tidy. Meredith was especially disgusted by the fact that Amanda rarely flushed or scoured the toilet. But that issue may have been in part cultural. Back home in Seattle, over-flushing is an ecological faux pas. “If it’s yellow let it mellow. If it’s brown flush it down,” goes the popular West Coast mantra. That brand of eco-vigilance is not part of the British psyche, however, and Meredith felt that Amanda was leaving the toilet dirty intentionally to offend her. She complained about it to her parents.

As is so often the case in university life, fast friendships die even more quickly than they form. Amanda and Meredith were very close when Amanda first
moved in. But the bond quickly withered, and everyone in the household soon grew wary of Amanda, who persisted in bringing home a parade of strangers even when the other girls asked her to stop. In Perugia, all sorts of young and not-so-young men lurk on the edges of the student scene, ever ready to make a drug connection or exploit some foreign girl’s romantic fantasies about life in Italy. Amanda did not always bring these men back for sex, although she did manage to bed a Greek, an Albanian, and an Italian other than Raffaele during her first few weeks in Perugia. Still, she was trusting and naive with strangers in a way that made the other roommates feel increasingly vulnerable. They worried that Amanda would bring home someone who would rape or rob them. Meredith was particularly concerned about an Argentinean man whom Amanda had met at an Internet café. He was too friendly, often touching and kissing both Amanda and Meredith against their will. Meredith told friends how uncomfortable she was about him coming to the house, and they, in turn, would tell police that the Argentinean was most likely her killer. But he was out of town when the murder occurred.

A few days after Meredith and Giacomo started their romantic relationship, on October 25, 2007,
Amanda met Raffaele Sollecito at a classical music concert. She was drawn to him immediately because he looked like Harry Potter, with his wire-rim glasses and boyish face. Raffaele was the son of a successful urologist in the southern city of Bari. The doctor was well-connected and treated the Pugliese elite; he showed up at court with an entourage that included bodyguards and a driver for his armored car. Raf was both spoiled and dominated by his father and had ready access to money with which to bankroll a penchant for drugs. While many of the other students in Perugia shared cramped rooms and slept on floors, Raffaele’s father had set his son up with his own apartment and a regular cleaning woman.

Raffaele’s mother died when he was young, and his father remarried a younger woman whose fur coats and coiffed hair with skunk highlights would become fodder for many pressroom jokes during the trial. Raf was a techie who spent long hours decoding difficult problems for his degree in computer studies. At one point during his trial, he was even asked to fix the prosecutor’s computer amid jokes that he might hit “delete all” when she turned her head. He also had a fascination with swords and knives. He always carried a switchblade with him and he often played with it
when he was bored. He even bragged to his father that he took a knife with him when he was called in for questioning by the police.

On his Facebook page, Raf wrote about being stoned all day, enjoying “risky things,” and at times being “completely crazy.” He posted photos of himself in various states of a drug haze; in one, he is wrapped in surgical bandages and brandishing a meat cleaver. Although he had little experience with women for an Italian man of twenty-three—there was only one girlfriend before Amanda—he was actively, somewhat morbidly, fixated on sex. He masturbated constantly, according to many of his university acquaintances. And a counselor in his college dorm would testify to once walking in to see a “bestiality scene” on Raffaele’s computer.

Amanda and Raffaele had been lovers for only one week when Meredith was killed. The relationship was fresh and passionate, but it was not monogamous for Amanda. She was still romantically linked to DJ, her old boyfriend from Seattle, and was still bedding casual acquaintances. Amanda told her Greek friend Spiros that she felt slightly guilty starting up with Raffaele when she still had feelings for DJ, who was kept in the dark about her life in Perugia even though they
talked on Skype and e-mailed often. Two nights after Amanda and Raf got involved, she also hooked up once more with Daniel de Luna, the friend of her downstairs neighbors, and later included him on the list of sex partners in her prison diary. Nevertheless, Raf bragged to friends that he and Amanda were having sex three or four times a day, usually under the influence of marijuana or hashish. His father was not happy about the romance. In an intercepted phone conversation days after the murder, he told his son to “erase” Amanda from his mind. “Cancel her out.” After Raffaele’s arrest, his father told ABC News, “She has ruined my son’s life. I damn the day he met her.”

While Raf appeared to have a bottomless bank account, Amanda had always struggled to pay her own way. She worked three jobs while attending university back in Washington and scrimped to save the money for a year abroad. She worked every night but Monday at Patrick Lumumba’s Le Chic bar, waiting tables and handing out flyers for the bar’s events. But Patrick had been heard to complain that Amanda spent more time talking and flirting with customers than she did selling drinks. He was about to fire her and was considering hiring Meredith for her job. Amanda was scheduled to work on November 1, the night after Halloween.

Italians do not celebrate Halloween, but the next day, All Souls’, is an important holiday. That’s the day when the spirits of the dead come to visit the living, and family members light candles and leave flowers at the graves of their loved ones. Perugia emptied out for the long holiday weekend. Both Laura and Filomena, eager to avoid the debauchery sure to accompany the foreign students’ Halloween parties, made plans to stay away. Filomena went to her boyfriend’s house, and Laura went home to Viterbo. Giacomo and the guys downstairs all went home to visit the graves of their aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Both Amanda and Meredith stayed out late on Halloween. Amanda worked at Le Chic and then went to a party until 5 A.M.; Meredith party-hopped until 6:30 A.M. Amanda then went to bed at Raffaele’s and returned home around 11 A.M. the next day to take a shower and change clothes. Meredith was there alone, and they chatted briefly. Amanda later recounted that Meredith’s jowls were still stained with the fake blood of her vampire costume. Raffaele arrived soon after Amanda got out of the shower, and the two went off to Amanda’s bedroom, where they say they had sex and took a nap.

Giacomo had left a key to the lower apartment with Meredith and asked her to look out for their adopted
stray cat and water the marijuana plants he kept under fluorescent lights in a narrow hallway. Meredith studied for a few hours, trying to finish a paper that was due on Monday, and then went downstairs to water the pot. When she finished, she sent Giacomo a flirty text message saying how excited she was to see him when he got back.

Around 3 P.M., too tired to study, Meredith left via della Pergola to visit her friend Robyn Butterworth, then twenty-two. She did not say good-bye to Amanda and Raffaele, who were still in Amanda’s room. Amanda and Raffaele say that an hour later, they went out for a classic
passeggiata,
the late afternoon stroll Italians take around the center of town, returning to Raffaele’s before Amanda was scheduled to work at Le Chic. They had sex one more time, and then, Amanda says, she left around 8 P.M. to go home and get ready for work. At 8:18 P.M., Patrick sent Amanda a text message to tell her that business was slow and that she did not have to come in that night. She wrote back, in Italian: “
Ci vediamo più tardi. Buona serata
—We’ll see you a little later. Good evening.” Both Raffaele’s and Amanda’s cell phones were turned off around 8:30 P.M. and turned on again just after 6 A.M. the next day. Amanda would later tell police that she went back to
Raffaele’s house, where they downloaded the movie
Stardust
and watched
Amélie,
made some dinner, smoked pot, and had sex. She described how they then took a shower together and how Raffaele dried her hair. But police computer technicians would determine that Raf did not download anything that night. At 8:40 P.M., his father called on the apartment’s land line, but no one answered.

Meanwhile, Meredith relaxed at Robyn’s house with her friends Amy Frost, then twenty-one, and Sophie Purton, then twenty. They laughed and gossiped about the night before. Then they made a pizza and an apple pie while watching
The Notebook
on DVD. At around 9 P.M., Meredith said she was tired. She and Sophie left together and split up on via Roscetto, each heading to her own house. No one knows exactly what happened next, although police would eventually gather these confusing details:

At 7:41 P.M., one of three closed-circuit TV cameras in the parking garage across from the girls’ villa captured the image of a man in a heavy jacket, wearing sneakers, heading toward via della Pergola. The camera caught him leaving twenty minutes later and again, after a half hour, returning in the direction of via della Pergola. The man was clearly white, not black, but
defense attorneys for both Raffaele and Amanda would later insist that this was Rudy Guede. At 8:43 P.M., the same video shows a woman in a white skirt—the prosecutor would claim that the woman was Amanda—heading home. Antonio Curatolo, then fifty-one, is a homeless man who spends his time on a bench by the Piazza Grimana basketball courts near the via della Pergola. He testified that he saw Amanda and Raffaele looking down toward the gate of the house around 9:30 P.M. He said they returned to the Piazza Grimana again at 10:30 and stood looking down over the railing toward Amanda and Meredith’s house. Then, he said, he saw them again shortly after midnight.

Hekuran Kokomani, thirty-three, is an Albanian handyman who is also believed to be a drug informant for the local police. He testified that he nearly ran into a big, black garbage bag the night of either October 31 or November 1. What Kokomani at first thought was a bag, he said, turned out to be Amanda, Raffaele, and Rudy, which caused even the jury to burst into laughter. Then, he told the court, Amanda brandished a knife at him, and in self-defense he threw his cell phones and a handful of fresh olives from the floor of his car at her.

Nara Capezzali, sixty-nine, lives in an apartment above the parking garage that overlooks via della Pergola. Her husband died in July 2007, and on November 1, she went to light a candle at his grave. That evening, she was lonely and sad. She flipped through the TV channels but didn’t find anything to watch, so she took her laxative and went to bed. Around 11:00 or 11:30 P.M.—she did not look at a clock—she woke up to use the toilet. On her way back to her bedroom, she heard a scream.